As of 13 August 2026, AI can check your expense categories.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, power-user skill, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open your bookkeeping software and export the relevant transactions with transaction reference, date, supplier, description, amount, VAT amount and current category.
   2. Open the current chart of accounts and your bookkeeping or expense policy, then copy the category definitions and rules into a working document.
   3. Gather the receipts, invoices, business purpose and existing VAT treatment for transactions whose descriptions are unclear or whose categories look unusual.
   4. Remove bank details and unrelated private information, then paste the transaction data, category definitions, supporting extracts and business rules into the prompt.
   5. Ask the model to return a row-by-row comparison, an evidence column, a confidence level and a separate list of transactions it cannot decide.
   6. Check each high-confidence suggestion against the receipt, business purpose and chart of accounts, and check VAT or tax flags against the relevant GOV.UK guidance.
   7. Send the low-confidence items and any VAT or tax questions to your accountant or responsible bookkeeper before changing the ledger, then update only the approved categories.

   Prompt

   Check the expense categories in the transaction data below for a UK business. Use only the supplied information and the stated chart of accounts. Do not invent facts, receipts, suppliers, business purposes, VAT treatment or accounting rules. For each transaction, return: transaction reference, current category, suggested category, confidence as high, medium or low, the evidence used, and the specific information still needed. Keep a separate list of ambiguous transactions and explain why they cannot be decided from the information supplied. Flag anything that may affect VAT or tax treatment, but do not give professional advice or make a final tax determination. Do not recategorise transactions automatically. At the end, list the checks I should make against GOV.UK or ask an accountant about. Transaction data: [paste CSV or spreadsheet rows]. Chart of accounts: [paste the current categories and definitions]. Receipts or supplier descriptions: [paste relevant extracts]. Business purpose and internal rules: [paste them]. VAT status and treatment already recorded: [paste them].

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.